Description

Copyright 2009

Dimensions: 7 X 9-1/4

Pages: 724

Edition: 2nd

Book

ISBN-10: 0-321-58030-3

ISBN-13: 978-0-321-58030-6

The world-wide developer community has downloaded over three million copies of BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) from the Eclipse web site. Built on the open-source Eclipse platform, BIRT is a powerful reporting system that provides an end-to-end solution, from creating and deploying reports to integrating report capabilities in enterprise applications.

The second of a two-book series on business intelligence and reporting technology, Integrating and Extending BIRT, Second Edition introduces programmers to BIRT architecture and the reporting framework. BIRT technology makes it possible for a programmer to build a customized report using scripting and BIRT APIs. A programmer can also extend the BIRT framework by creating a new plug-in using the Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment. This book provides extensive examples on how to build plug-ins to extend the features of the BIRT framework. The source code for these examples is available for download.

The topics discussed include

Installing and deploying BIRT

Deploying a BIRT report to an application server

Understanding BIRT architecture

Scripting in a BIRT report design

Integrating BIRT functionality into applications

Working with the BIRT extension framework

This second edition, revised and expanded, adds the following new content

Chapter 14: Programming using the BIRT Reporting APIs 275Building a reporting application 276Generating reports from an application 279Programming with a report design 302

Chapter 15: Programming using the BIRT Charting API 321About the chart engine contents 321About the environment for charting application 322Using the charting API to modify an existing chart 324Using the charting APIs to create a new chart 330Using a chart item in a report design 336Using the BIRT charting API in a Java Swing application 345Understanding the chart programming examples 351

Part V: Working with the Extension Framework 359Chapter 16: Building the BIRT Project 361About building the BIRT project 361Installing a working version of BIRT 362Configuring the Eclipse workspace to compile BIRT 362Downloading and extracting the correct version of the BIRT source code 364Importing, building, and testing the BIRT project 364Building new JAR files to display BIRT output 367

Chapter 17: Extending BIRT 369Overview of the extension framework 369Understanding the structure of a BIRT plug-in 370Working with the Eclipse PDE 377Creating the structure of a plug-in extension 381Creating the plug-in extension content 385Building a plug-in extension 390Deploying the extension plug-in 393Downloading the code for the extension examples 398